Workplace Injuries | InjuryBoard Raleigh

Mail fraud indictments are a favorite tool of federal prosecutors for just about any campaign de jour .These charges were used recently in a case brought by federal prosecutors against a workers' compensation claimant. A former employee of the Postal Service has denied federal charges of lying about disabilities while she collected approximately $69,000 in benefits from workers' compensation. On...

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A man from El Cajon, California is claiming that he lost half of his benefits from workers' compensation due to his race.The workers' compensation plan of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger contains language that is somewhat vague, which has allowed medical examiners to use age, race, and sex when determining how much should be paid by a company in a claim for workers' compensation.Milton...

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Fortunately, cheaters who try to defraud the workers' compensation system almost always get caught. These few cheaters should be punished severely. They not only hurt their employers and their insurance companies, they also make it harder for legitimate claimants to recover the benefits to which they are entitled.Workers' compensation fraud and wrongdoing by employers and their insurance...

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A cluster of workers at a pork processing plant in Minnesota have contracted an illness that has been connected with the workers' exposure to particles of pig brains. The workers were found to be exposed by inhaling the bits of pig brain during a process where the brains are blown out of the skull of the pig using compressed air. The brains are harvested packaged and sold primarily to Japan...

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Employees are entitled to benefits from workers' compensation whenever they receive a personal injury "arising out of and in the course of employment. For example, a machinist received an injury to his eye from flying glass from a cola bottle while on his lunch break that caused blindness in that eye. As he was placing the bottle in the cooler, it exploded. He would be entitled to receive...

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On Friday, September 1, 2007, the North Carolina Rate Bureau filed a request with the N.C. Department of Insurance for a 5.9% increase in workers' compensation insurance rates. A request for an increase in insurance rates, in itself may be alarming to N.C. employers and employess. However, the requested rate increase pales in comparison to the 2006 request of 12.1%. The Depart of Insurance...

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A recent article in the New York Times raises questions about the accuracy of data and reports presented by the clinic that took on the responsibility of screening and examining volunteers and people who were working at Ground Zero. The Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine has examined more than 15,000 workers and volunteers and has overseen the examination of...

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In workers' compensation cases, a claim is not compensable if an employee is injured while going to work or coming home from work. This is commonly referred to as the "going and coming" rule.There are numerous exceptions to this rule. One exception is the traveling salesman rule which applies to salesmen who are required in their job to travel from customer to customer. In the case of a...

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This past March (3/6/07) the North Carolina Court of Appeals addressed the issue of whether a 6th grade teacher's physician-diagnosed anxiety disorder was compensable under North Carolina's Workers' Compensation Act. After a review of the facts found by the Industrial Commission the Court concluded that teaching sixth graders did not expose the teacher to any stressors that were not experienced...

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An employer's brazen doctor shopping efforts to terminate workers' compensation benefits backfired in a recent case. A decision of the North Carolina Industrial Commission granted full workers' compensation benefits to an injured employee and found that the employer's efforts to deny benefits constituted stubborn and unfounded litigiousness and that the appeals were brought by the employer...

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In a recent research study, two Duke professors examined the claims and records of nearly 12,000 Duke employees from 1997 to 2004. The researchers concluded that extremely obese employees filed two times as many workers' compensation claim as non-obese employees. The study also found that the extremely obese workers had seven times higher medical costs and stayed out of work 13 times longer...

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At a major redevelopment project in downtown Durham, a construction worker, 35, was killed in a fatal construction accident.The worker was on the inside of the old offices of Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. when a brick wall collapsed, crushing him. The building is one of seven vintage structures being rehabilitated for shops.According to police, the worker had only worked at the site for just a few...

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